Ornamental orchid breeding programs have been conducted to develop commercially valuable cultivars with improved characteristics of commercial interest, such as size, flower color, pattern, shape, and resistance to pathogens. Conventional breeding, including sexual hybridization followed by selection of desirable characteristics in plants, has so far been the main method for ornamental breeding, but other techniques, including mutation induction by polyploidization and gamma irradiation, and biotechnological techniques, such as genetic transformation, have also been studied and used in ornamental breeding programs. Orchids are one of the most commercially important families in floriculture industry, having very particular reproductive biology characteristics and being a well-studied group of ornamentals in terms of genetic improvement. The present review focuses on the conventional and biotechnological techniques and approaches specially employed in breeding Phalaenopsis orchids, the genus with highest worldwide importance as an ornamental orchid, highlighting the main limitations and strengths of the approaches. Furthermore, new opportunities and future prospects for ornamental breeding in the CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing era are also discussed. We conclude that conventional hybridization remains the most used method to obtain new cultivars in orchids. However, the emergence of the first biotechnology-derived cultivars, as well as the new biotechnological tools available, such as CRISPR-Cas9, rekindled the full potential of biotechnology approaches and their importance for improve ornamental orchid breeding programs.

观赏兰花育种计划的目的是开发具有商业价值的品种，这些品种具有改进的商业利益特征，例如大小、花色、图案、形状和对病原体的抗性。迄今为止，传统育种，包括有性杂交，然后选择植物中所需的特性，一直是观赏育种的主要方法，但其他技术，包括通过多倍体化和伽马射线照射进行突变诱导，以及生物技术，例如遗传转化，也已成为观赏育种的主要方法。已被研究并用于观赏育种计划。兰花是花卉业中最具商业价值的科类之一，具有非常独特的生殖生物学特征，并且是在遗传改良方面经过充分研究的观赏植物群体。本综述重点关注专门用于培育蝴蝶兰（蝴蝶兰是全球最重要的观赏兰花）的传统和生物技术技术和方法，强调了这些方法的主要局限性和优点。此外，还讨论了CRISPR/Cas9基因组编辑时代观赏育种的新机遇和未来前景。我们得出的结论是，传统杂交仍然是获得兰花新品种最常用的方法。然而，第一个生物技术衍生品种的出现，以及新的生物技术工具（例如 CRISPR-Cas9）的出现，重新激发了生物技术方法的全部潜力及其对改善观赏兰花育种计划的重要性。